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Monday, June 9, 2014

Re-anchoring Fiat Money to Gold

Dr. Thorsten Polleit in his 2009 presentation about sound money proposed "an arbitrary and politically motivated solution" to existing monetary system. He was afraid that drastically returning to free market money would destroy the exhange value of fiat money that would eventually lead to chaos. And so he considered his proposal as "lesser evil," re-anchoring fiat money to gold. From there, the world can proceed to privatization and monetary competition.

I enjoy watching the video. It is as if, I was there. I enjoy the clapping, the seriousness, and the laughing especially that part when Douglas E. French, the Vice-President of Ludwig von Mises Institute was asked to give the concluding remark. As he stood, he cracked a joke:

"Well, I have good news! There were no bank failure yesterday in the United States! So evidently the crisis is over! So don't worry about all your deposits while you've been here. Everything has been fine."

And then he turned serious:

"We're not just here to gather, and talk among ourselves, and pat ourselves on the back for being right, and have fun, making fun of Keynesians and socialists as fun that it is to do. But the fact is, there is much more to do. There is more research to do. There is more writing to do. There are more speeches to give. And the fact is, there are millions of minds that we need to change . . . So no matter what's the government is doing to us, if you believe that the pen is mightier than the sword, if you believe that ideas do matter, then with the brilliance of Mises and Rothbardd, we will change the world!"

Here is the video and few notes that I consider useful:

1. About the most destructive enemy of capitalism.

"Mises knew that capitalism, for a number of reasons, has politically powerful enemies. The most powerful, most destructive, and most vicious and subversive of these would be false monetary theory and, as a result, a misguided monetary system, as it inevitably will destroy the free societal order."

2. Quoting Mises about the need for sound money.

"The clamor to eliminate the deficiencies in the filed of money has become universal. People have become convinced that the restoration of domestic peace within nations and the revival of international economic relations are impossible without a sound monetary system."

3. About the three philosophies that underlie the assumptions of mainstream economists.

"All of these works made important contributions to economic theory and the procapitalism debate, and all of them were in stark opposition to the prevailing mainstream viewpoint of the profession — which had been characterized by (logical) positivism, empiricism, and societal relativism — in fact, these tenets have remained the very guiding principles along which today's mainstream economics is still being built."

4. About money and civilization.

"We can conclude that money plays a key role in facilitating and intensifying the process of civilization. However, this holds true only for free-market money, while with government-controlled fiat money, the opposing tendency comes into operation, namely the process of decivilization."

5. About the difficulty of existing situation.

"But now comes the hard — the political-economic — part, of which Mises was so well aware. In view of an approaching depression, people start calling for the continuation of the very policies that have caused the malaise: even lower interest rates through a further increase in the supply of credit and money; more credit and money at the lowest possible interest rate are seen as a remedy rather than cause of the malaise."

6. And finally about the influence of Karl Marx on mainstream economists.

"In fact, Karl Marx would most likely be delighted to see what mainstream economists, including many who would think of themselves as capitalism-friendly economists, are calling for."

"In effect, most mainstream economists agree now with Marx in calling for the 'centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly,' which is actually proposal number five in his Communist Manifesto, published in 1848."